Past Due

by Richard Stockford

  Past Due

  By

  Richard Stockford

  Copyright 2015 Richard Stockford

  Thank you for purchasing this ebook.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for reading and respecting the hard work of this author.

  Contents

  Book one

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Book Two

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  About the Author

  Book One

  16 June 1937

  Chapter 1.1

  The angry, fat, gray squirrel froze against the rough pine bark as the intruders edged closer. Over time, the squirrel had developed some tolerance for people and their movement in the gravel parking lot below, but the surrounding brush was his territory, and he would defend it at all costs.

  Agent Penn Sloater winced at the squirrel’s strident chittering from the big pine tree at the edge of the roadhouse lot. Nothing in his experience as special agent in charge of the Boston office of the FBI had prepared him for the fine art of woodland ambushes, and it didn’t help that he hadn’t slept in twenty-four hours and now even the irate squirrel seemed critical of his tactics.

  At age thirty-seven, Sloater was one of the new breed of law enforcement professionals. A graduate of Yale University, he neither drank nor used profanity, always dressed like a successful businessman and truly believed in his own role as a defender of the public good.

  Yesterday morning, Sloater had been in his office, immersed in the familiar tasks of directing and reviewing the activities of his six man staff, when a frantic phone call from the chief of police in Bangor, Maine pierced the atmosphere of professional decorum.

  “I got the Edgewink gang up here!” the chief bawled in tinny exhilaration. “They’re right here in Bangor, and you need to get up here. We’re going to take ‘em tonight ‘n you need to be here.”

  Twenty-nine year old Lester Edgewink, originally from Iowa, and Boston natives Michael Whary and Aemon Kennon, both twenty-two, had terrorized the greater Boston area for the past eighteen months with a series of armed robberies and at least two killings. They evaded capture by hanging together, eschewing family and friends, although Aemon Kennon did have a girlfriend he occasionally slipped away to visit, a young maid in the employ of a prominent Boston businessman, and Michael Whary sometimes tended to strong drink and uncertain companions. Their close bond was the exception that proved the rule that there is no honor among thieves. Kennon and Whary trusted Lester to shape their daily routines, plan the jobs and hold the proceeds from the crimes, and Lester, in turn, provided them with the good life, plenty of spending money and excitement. As Boston still languished in the grip of the Great Depression, the continuing success of their daring daylight heists had elevated them to almost folk-hero status among the city’s poor and unemployed. After long months of unsuccessful local police investigations, a federal arrest warrant had finally been issued for the three men in connection with a jewelry store robbery in which a female employee had been taken hostage and transported into New Hampshire as the gang once again successfully eluded police pursuit. Although the woman had ultimately been released unharmed, the interstate abduction had allowed the FBI to take up the hunt, and Sloater, his basic sense of morality offended by the gang’s blatant lawlessness, had made the capture of Lester Edgewink and his men his highest personal priority.

  As evidence was gathered tying the gang to a widening circle of violent crimes, mostly jewelry store robberies, and one very successful bank robbery, wanted posters had gone out by the hundreds to police stations and post offices throughout New England, and now that effort was paying off.

  When Sloater managed to calm the excited chief, he learned that Lester Edgewink had been spotted by an off-duty patrolman in a roadhouse on the outskirts of town. Sitting in an adjacent booth with his wife, the veteran officer had listened in as Edgewink and his two companions flirted with the waitress, promising to return the following morning for breakfast. He’d gotten a look at their car when they left, and subsequent investigation indicated that the three hoodlums were staying at a motor court in a nearby town.

  Sloater convinced the chief to postpone his night-time operation on the crowded motor court, and within two hours of the call, he and two of his agents were on the road to Bangor.

  A six hour drive led them to a pleasant city of about 25,000 located on a wide river in central Maine. Bounded on the north and south by high, forested ridges, Bangor was an isolated pocket community, first settled as a fur trading outpost in 1761 that had grown up around the region’s productive logging industry. Sloater and his men drove directly to the city police station, and now, after a night of furious planning, they were part of a group of Maine State Police, Bangor Police, County Sheriff’s deputies and various other law enforcement and semi-official onlookers lying in the damp underbrush surrounding the roadhouse which had been closed and evacuated, much to the disgust of its tightfisted Yankee owner.

  The plan had three police sharpshooters camouflaged in the shallow ditch across the road from the roadhouse armed with Winchester .351 automatic rifles and orders to shoot to kill… but only upon command. Sloater had argued vigorously that the gang members should be taken alive, placed on trial and then executed as a highly visible deterrent to mob lawlessness. The Bangor Police Chief, a genial, but rather unimaginative man, had smiled and nodded patiently and then continued to talk of firepower and weapons selection, but Sloater was pretty sure he had made his point. They certainly had enough manpower to affect a peaceful arrest. Besides the sharpshooters, there were squads of officers in the brush along both sides of the parking lot armed with a variety of handguns and shotguns, and a large group waiting in reserve behind the building. Agent Sloater was crouched with the Bangor Police Chief behind a group of pines at the right front corner of the lot, wondering for the tenth time what in hell the Edgewink gang was doing in this hayseed village.

  At precisely 8:15 on the morning of June 17th, 1937, death laid a bony finger on peaceful Bangor. A black ’29 Buick sedan pulled into the lot from the south, followed immediately by Ebenezer Sproul’s ’27 Chevy pickup hauling a farm trailer loaded with baled hay. At sixty-seven, Ebenezer still went to work his fields at sunup every day, but lately he had become more inclined to take a morning break at the roadhouse for coffee and a piece of pie. He trailed the Buick into the lot and parked between it and the road, effectively taking the sharpshooters out of the fight. Edgewink and Kennon got out of the Buick and stopped, staring in sudden suspicion at the empty parking lot and quiet roadhouse. Ebenezer climbed down from his truck just in time to hear the Police Chief hollering that they were all under arrest, and froze in dull confusion as the two strangers in front of him suddenly, inexplicably, pulled guns and began firing at the trees.

  Sloater saw the plan’s flaw in a sudden flash of intuition and burr
owed down behind his tree in panicked self-preservation as a perfect hell of gunfire erupted from both sides of the lot. Pistols cracked and shotguns thundered in a ragged blast of noise and smoke with Ed Laughlin’s Thompson sub machine gun adding a steady, staccato beat that tied the whole thing together in a wild, Wagnerian symphony. Aemon Kennon died instantly, struck by five of the twenty-nine bullets directed at him. On the other side of the lot, Bangor officers Bernie Elmore and Adolph Kline each intercepted several of the remaining wild shots and died where they lay (to the credit of the other officers on that side of the lot, they did succeed in wounding three of their opposite numbers and shooting the windshields out of both the Buick and the farm truck). Edgewink leaped into the back of the Buick as Michael Whary slammed it into gear. He began shooting out of the rear window, a Smith and Wesson .38 revolver in each hand, and managed to kill one deputy and wound another before Whary took a fatal bullet to the back of the head and slumped over, flooring the accelerator in his death spasm. Edgewink fell to the floorboards as the big Buick jumped ahead, running over an incredulous Ebenezer Sproul and crushing the Police Chief, who had gotten to his feet and stepped out into the lot, to death against the big pine tree. By this time, the sharpshooters had climbed out of the ditch and run down the road until they could see around the farm truck. They unleashed a torrent of fire towards the stalled Buick and succeeded in killing one sheriff’s deputy and wounding three other officers and a game warden before finally silencing Edgewink’s fire with a bullet that ricocheted into his chest. The final score for the thirty-nine second battle was, Edgewink gang: two dead and one wounded; Bangor law enforcement: six dead, eight wounded.

  Death chuckled and moved on, and the stunned gray squirrel crept mutely into the tree top as silence reclaimed the Bangor morning.

  Chapter 1.2

  July 8, 1937

  Despite its pastoral setting high atop a hill on the outskirts of town, the Bangor State Hospital was a foreboding sight from the outside. Constructed in 1901 according to a then recommended federal template, the blood-red brick and gray native granite building sat on the site of an abandoned civil war artillery garrison, its steep, dormered black slate roofs loomed darkly over one hundred acres of fields, gardens and outbuildings. Behind its barred windows and locked doors, the institution, originally known as the Bangor Insane Hospital, housed more than five hundred nighttime residents, ranging from the mildly confused to the violent, criminally insane, and their pain and hopelessness hung over it in a palpable miasma of pain and despair. In fine counterpoint, daytimes, such as this beautiful early summer afternoon, saw the majority of the patients outside mingling with staff, volunteers and visitors. Some of them gathered in small vignettes reminiscent of Victorian England’s genteel society, chatting brightly of inconsequential things, while others worked at the hospital’s farm, gardens, hen houses and piggery under the watchful eyes of orderlies and hospital employees, and yet others sat in varying degrees of catatonic stupor, oblivious to their surroundings. The State Hospital administration was proud of the fact that much of the hospital’s food needs were produced on site with a significant amount left over for local sales, the proceeds of which augmented the State budget.

  The hospital’s bent toward self-sufficiency extended to the mortuary and cemetery discreetly positioned at the rear of the buildings within a fine maple grove. The mortuary was in a large brick building that was all that was left of the long-disbanded light artillery garrison, and the cemetery had started as a burial ground for the garrison’s horses. In the thirty-six years since the hospital had opened its doors, the forest of plain stone markers had grown to rival the largest cemeteries in town. The first hospital director had converted one of two old munitions bunkers, set into the side of a hill beside the mortuary, into a mausoleum which became the final resting place of some notable, long-term residents (the stone markers, and even unmarked graves served admirably for the run-of-the-mill patient clientele). The second bunker, further from the mortuary, was used to store the bodies of those who died during the winter until the ground thawed sufficiently for burial in the spring.

  Abel Edgewink sat in the sun on the rambling stone wall that followed a half mile of tree lined, winding drive from the road to the massive main entryway. A handsome young man in his early twenties, he exchanged easy smiles with passers-by as he rested. Abel had been in Bangor for a couple of days, scouting out the hospital grounds, and he’d noticed that, along with patients, staff and visitors, townspeople were also on the hospital grounds as volunteers, working in the gardens and tending the chickens, pigs and sheep that were apparently raised for hospital use. There was also a crew of workmen building a foundation for what looked like a new wing being added to the main building. Most importantly, Abel had realized that the workmen and volunteers came and went as they pleased with no apparent formality. On the second day, he’d stolen a shovel from a farm near the motor court where he was staying, and he now carried it as a prop, a visa to roam the grounds at will. After spending the morning working in a vegetable garden and being accepted without question as just another volunteer, he was now considering trying to blend in with the workmen at the main building.

  Three weeks ago, Abel had been relaxing in a Berlin, Vermont diner, waiting for the call to meet his brother Lester in Maine, when news of the gang’s capture had come over the radio. At just twenty years of age, Abel was the silent member of the Edgewink gang, protected by his older sibling, and relegated to planning and holding the loot, never an active participant. Living in a small rooming house under the name Abel Owens and meeting only infrequently with Lester in isolated spots outside of the city, he had no visible ties to the gang. The last time they met, Abel had been given the combined proceeds of the gang’s last three jewelry heists and instructed to lay low in Vermont until he was called. This was not the first time he had been given loot to hold and now, hidden beneath the rear seat of his 1922 Chevrolet sedan, Abel carried a canvass satchel containing $100,000 in cash and about twenty pounds of jewelry and precious stones. Until he heard the news of Lester’s capture, Abel had been bored with his part in the proceedings. He owned the car he was driving - Lester was adamant that he take no chance of discovery by operating a stolen vehicle - and had plenty of traveling money and no responsibilities other than guarding the gang’s communal treasure, but he longed to be in the thick of the action with Lester.

  Upon hearing the news that Lester had survived the massacre in Bangor, Abel determined to go to him, help him escape whatever custody he was in, and rebuild the gang with himself as an equal partner. He drove directly to the Bangor Hospital and, posing as an out-of-town reporter, found out that Lester had survived his wound and the subsequent surgery and was to be sent to the secure Bangor State Hospital for convalescence.

  At the same time Abel Edgewink was sitting on the stone wall considering his chances of joining the foundation crew, Penn Sloater was sitting in his Boston office, gritting his teeth in angry frustration. The debacle in Bangor had earned him a scathing rebuke from his superiors in Washington, and he had just learned that a Federal Judge was refusing to issue an order to remand Lester Edgewink for trial, ruling that his physical injuries and uncertain mental state required that he remain in the care and custody of the State of Maine. Sloater desperately wanted a conviction of the last remaining gang member, if for no other reason than to justify the botched capture, but he also wanted a chance to sweat Edgewink on his own home ground.

  In the surreal aftermath of the shootout, a dazed Sloater had wandered across the parking lot from body to body. He bent into the Buick to discover a semi-conscious Lester Edgewink pawing feebly at a knife partially concealed under his blood soaked shirt. Sloater snatched the knife, a long pointed weapon with a wooden handle and a guard shaped into brass knuckles, and thrust it into his belt. The gang’s weapons and personal effects would be taken by the Bangor Police and preserved as a memorial to the day’s heroic events, but Lester’s knife became Sloater’
s personal reminder of the day’s insanity. Now, sitting at his desk, he absent mindedly twisted the knife in his hands, remembering the ignominious end of his trip to Maine.

  Two days after the shooting, Sloater had been allowed to briefly question Edgewink in his hospital bed. He was not looking for a confession – there was already plenty of evidence for multiple convictions - but rather some clues to the whereabouts of the property stolen by the gang in the past months. Pressure from insurance companies facing huge payouts was trickling down from his superiors, and the more he investigated, the more he realized that this gang was unique in its retention of loot. Local detectives and his own people had hounded the pawn shops, snitches and fences of the greater Boston area, but to no avail. Somewhere, a fortune in stolen jewelry was waiting to be recovered, and Sloater had been infuriated and deeply frustrated by Edgewink’s mocking refusal to talk.

  Chapter 1.3

  July 24, 1937

  Dr. Brenden Hopewell peered out his kitchen window to watch his eighteen year old daughter Heidi chatting with a hospital volunteer by the front gate. A widower, Dr. Hopewell had brought his daughter to this small cottage on the grounds of the Bangor State Hospital when he had taken the position of Hospital Director last September. It had been an exciting time for Hopewell, who had been hired away from a big city hospital by the State of Maine to modernize the hospital’s psychiatric practices, but it had also been a long, lonely winter for Heidi, and he was glad to see her making friends and interacting with the volunteers and visitors that crowded the grounds in good weather. Dr. Hopewell had taken notice of the young man she was talking with because of his easy manner around the patients and their families. He showed up every morning for the past couple of weeks, working in the gardens or, more and more frequently, attending patients and running errands for the nurses, never losing his cheerful smile and pleasant demeanor.